Archive for January, 2009

Jan 26 2009

PageRank for Scientific Papers

Published by under science

How do you know the relative weight of a scientific paper?  Is it well respected in the field?  Often Cited?  Maslov and Redner discuss the Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google’s PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks.  Interestingly, of the top 10 papers by pagerank, 9 are by Nobel Prize winners.

No responses yet

Jan 11 2009

Running your Accord on Trash

Published by under Mr. Fusion

Mr. Fusion coming closer to reality everyday.  An Instructables on converting your Accord to run on trash.  I have to say, the resulting plastic flextube and boiler look is not nearly as slick as the original Mr. Fusion styling.  Maybe the key innovation between now and 2015 is not the actual technology, but the aesthetics. […]

No responses yet

Jan 06 2009

Picasa for Mac

Published by under technology

Hallelujah, Picasa for Mac has been released. I never could get used to iPhoto and it’s foibles, always wishing there was a Picasa release for the Mac. This also allows you to standardize on one photo organizer for all platforms. Fantastic!

No responses yet

Jan 06 2009

What happened to A New Kind of Science?

Published by under books,science

The recent genesis post reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and prompted me to check its Amazon listing.  I thought there must be many people who never read it, and would now be trying to sell it used.  Sure enough, there’s more than 100 copies available for $11 and up. However […]

No responses yet

Jan 06 2009

Genesis

Published by under science

Interesting article on Wired from a few months ago that was brought to my attention by their end-of-year best-of post:  Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life It’s interesting that there are a variety of primitive bacteria and archaea that are still hanging around the planet, but the simple precursors of them […]

No responses yet

Jan 03 2009

The Serendipity Effect

Published by under Serendipity Effect

I have noticed for many years, that when I come into contact with a new concept, word, or fact, that I have seemingly never come across before, it will reappear again one or two times in the following fortnight.  I’ve never had a name for it, but let’s call it the Serendipity Effect. I used […]

No responses yet